How to put a map, a video or a booking widget on your website

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 13 August 2026 · 7 min read

You can embed all of them, and each one is a piece of someone else's website running inside yours. That's the deal. You get something you couldn't build — a working map, a video player, a booking calendar — and in exchange your page carries their weight, breaks when they break, and often sets their cookies on your visitors. Worth it for some. Not for the map, usually.

What you're actually doing

An embed isn't a picture of a map. It's a small window into another company's site, and when your page loads, so does theirs. Three consequences follow, and none of them is obvious from the paste-this-code instructions:

None of that means don't. It means each embed needs to be doing a job that a link can't.

The verdicts

Why the map is the wrong instinct

Almost every small business site has an embedded map on the contact page. Think about what the visitor is actually doing there: they're on a phone, they want to get to you, and what they need is directions in the map app they already use.

The embedded map doesn't give them that. It gives them a small draggable rectangle which they will pinch at for a moment before tapping through to their own maps app anyway. You've paid the full weight of the embed to deliver a tap they were going to make regardless.

The exception is genuine ambiguity — you're in a courtyard, an industrial estate, above a different shop. Then a picture of the actual door does more good than any map, embedded or not.

Load-on-click: have both

For anything you do want embedded, this is the pattern worth knowing. Instead of loading the video player when the page loads, show a still frame with a play button on it. Only when somebody taps does the real player load.

Most visitors never press play. Making all of them pay for the player so a handful can save a second is the wrong way round.

The cookie bit, practically

This isn't legal advice and I'm not going to pretend otherwise — what your business specifically must do is a question for someone qualified. But the practical shape is simple enough to be useful.

A plain static site with no embeds and no tracking scripts generally has nothing to ask consent about, because nothing is being set. Add an embed and that usually changes — which is why so many small sites end up with a banner. If you want to know what yours does, open it in a private window and look at the cookies before you click on anything. Whatever's there arrived uninvited.

Fewer embeds, less to disclose. That's not a legal argument, it's just less machinery.

Doing it well

1. One per page, on the page it belongs to.
   The booking widget goes on the booking page. Not in the footer of all eleven pages, where it loads every single time and helps on one.
2. Keep the plain version underneath.
   Address and phone number as text, even with a map. Opening hours as text, even with a booking calendar. If the embed dies, the page still works — and text is what machines read anyway.
3. Ask for load-on-click by default.
   It's a normal thing to request and it costs nothing.
4. Check it on a phone, on mobile data.
   Same test as the one for photos, and embeds fail it more often.

The prompt

Questions people ask

Related reading

• Lots of photos without a slow website — the other half of what makes pages heavy.
• Your opening hours are wrong in nine places — why the plain text underneath matters.
• A contact form without any code — one thing you don't need a third party for.